Amnesty International today announced a new #360Syria “virtual tour” website showing the devastation brought by Syrian government barrel bombing of the besieged city of Aleppo. The website demonstration, called “Fear of the Sky” (www.360Syria.com), is built using Mozilla A-Frame technology.

Websites like #360Syria, that allow viewers to take a virtual tour of the devastated city of Aleppo, are a significant new use case for WebVR. Technology gives people a voice where otherwise there is none. It brings a new level of visibility and greater levels of empathy to real-life situations.

The #360Syria website comprises specially-created 360-degree photography, narration, sound recordings, 3-D data graphics and videos gathered by Amnesty-trained Syrian media activists. The site was created in partnership with San Francisco design and technology company Junior (www.junior.io).

A-Frame is an open source framework that simplifies WebVR development and enables easy creation of WebVR experiences with HTML. Because A-Frame is built around building blocks that can be extended and combined into limitless combinations, it provides a high degree of creative freedom.It is designed and maintained by MozVR (Mozilla’s virtual reality research team) and optimizes for a smooth learning curve between ease-of-use for developers who are new to virtual reality technology and increased flexibility for advanced developers.

At Mozilla one of our goals is to bring high-performance, responsive virtual reality technology to the open Web. We launched A-Frame, an open source library for creating virtual reality Web experiences, so that Web developers could create virtual reality websites from a single line of HTML code and bypass complex 3D APIs like WebGL.

Our hope is that A-Frame provides a constructive contribution to a growing pantheon of WebVR development tools, helping to grow the number of VR Web developers and experiences.